Rita L Robinson we have some concerns. LADOT’s unreliability problem.

“Today I took the Commuter Express instead of Metro to work. That meant I had to wake up nearly 2 hours earlier, but the 549 goes straight from my residence at Sepulveda/Ventura to my office at Pass/Alameda. It seemed all worthwhile when I got on board and discovered the plushy seats, air-conditioned comfort and quiet clientele.

Then the Commuter Express failed to show up in the evening. There I was, sitting at the stop marked 549 Encino. I stood there for 45 minutes, a period of time that, according to the schedule, two different buses were supposed to arrive, and eventually just gave up and walked over to the Metro 96 stop down the street. That bus, of course, showed up - and on time, I might add.

What gives? Is there someone I can complain to about this? It sucks to be stranded! Is this what you meant by "outside of downtown LA it's extremely unreliable" in your post?” Nancy, public transit rider and The Bus Bench reader.

Lady Robinson, General Manager and goddess of city parking and special event street closures public transit riders have a bit of a problem with your service. Yes you run a clean busline, but it’s only clean on the surface.

The LADOT is the supermodel and star footplayer of transit. On the surface it’s a superior specimen until you try to talk to it.

LADOT in it's human form  the supermodel (Giselle Bundchen) and the star football player (Tom Brady)

Back in 2006 when I lived in Los Feliz I had a job at an indie type paper in Hollywood. To get to the office it involved a trip on the Dash.

The Hollywood Dash and occasionally the Los Feliz Dash was what I took. I remember standing outside of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Hillhurst at around 6:30 a.m. (which is the first bus out according to the schedule) and waiting and waiting and waiting…I remember being very annoyed, because this had happened numerous times. I remember calling your customer service line which used to be prominently posted at your bus stops.

I never understood why this bus was late. There isn’t much traffic on the Los Feliz circuit at 6:30am.

On the Hollywood Dash the LADOT  (driver, customer service) would regularly use the “traffic” excuse. I knew it was a lie. I knew the drivers just weren’t concerned enough to start their routes on time. I knew the drivers were probably at Stabucks or Jamba Juice or on their cellphone. In general before the gas crisis the majority of the people taking the Dash were seniors. People who rode the Dash had more flexible schedules (though I did have several conversations with elderly passengers who had missed medical appointments owing to depending on the Dash) except within your circuit which only goes around downtown LA, very reliable for your friends in City Hall. Your friends in City Hall who don’t even care, because even though it was free they never bothered to use it.

I always suspected the older passengers on the Dash had started out as teenagers at Hollywood High School, but the bus just never showed up. I think missing kids in LA are simply all waiting for busses that never showed up.

On a serious note we wonder why the tragedies of the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market happens, this kind of bus service is why

I attempted to take various Hollywood Dashes (there are five Dashes that service the Hollywood area) over a period of five months, no more like one month and a half it just felt like half a year. Your customer service reps probably remember me, because I called everyday over a two week period towards the end. The response from your customer service division was very, very nasty and it wasn’t just the nasty that was a problem in itself. It was the nasty mixed in with the doing nothing to make the situation for riders better. While I love talking crapola about the MTA (it’s totally fun, I suggest you try it) at least 75% of the time the MTA customer service reps seem like they care (though they can do nothing and they can not give any information.)

Being that your service area is smaller than Metro's, your reps knew exactly where drivers were and could call them and since they could do this and I was making regular complaints I am not sure why nothing was ever done about your unbelievably UNRELIABLE service in SOME areas.

I know what you did do.

You changed your 808 number to route to a transit store, where I was told you could do nothing..

(Though I’ve called about Nancy’s concern and you seemed to have reinstated it for Commuter Express riders, meaning LADOT staff are now logging complaints again, so good for fixing that portion.)

People complained and instead of fixing the problem you make your 808 number or rather you changed it to the LADOT store number and told us if we had any problems or needed to know the schedule to call 1-800-COMMUTE.

You also reduced the service of the Los Feliz Dash and we’re still wondering what happened to the Silver Lake Dash.

I know what I did, I got on my bike, but there is a problem with that. This nonchalant I don’t give a damn attitude about time flows through to the Commuter Express and possibly even your service for the disabled the City Ride. I waited with my differently-abled friend for one hour waiting for one of your Hollywood Dashes. We couldn’t move, because his legs locked up after twenty minutes.

Maybe your supermodel friends do not care about time. Being late to a cocktail party is fashionable, but do I look like I can afford some Manolos’s?

Not everyone is physically able to ride a bike (certainly not your Commuter Express routes) and many people do not like riding a bike through the traffic of Hollywood or Watts or Koreatown.We at The Bus Bench had assumed that your incompetence only was among the Dashes, though one of us did get stranded in Tujunga once owing to an LADOT run Commuter Express not showing up, but we thought it was an anomaly, but we’ve been hearing stories.

Do you know how many times I almost got doored or killed just because your service was so crappy that I had to come up with alternatives? The number is five times. Five times I almost died, because your drivers could never bother to show up on time (and because I’m a very reckless cyclist, but that’s beside the point.)

We don’t want to needlessly complain about mistakes. We get this is a big city and things happen, but the same thing happening over and over again points to a problem.

We’ve been hearing stories like Nancy’s and we want to know do you get that being on time is an important things for people who take public transit?

Being on time is more important than air conditioning, cushy seats and sane drivers. And being on time throughout your entire service area and not just parts of your service area. Like your favorite service area, downtown LA which may I add runs splendidly.

LADOT’s service in downtown LA is excellent. The drivers are competent. I was just on one of your nice clean always air conditioned downtown Dashes (F and E) the other day. I was on my way to South Park to look at the Evo. I got on the wrong Dash and not only was the driver able to tell me which Dash I should have gotten on, he gave me a transfer and directed me exactly where to go. That’s great. That almost never happens on the Metro, if you’re lost you just have to pull yourself up by your own bus pass.

But with all of your goodness and competence within your downtown LA Dash circuit it must be translated into the same kind of concern for your other lines in other parts of town. And some of your other lines according to riders (which always give you an A+ for being clean) are very late if they come all.

So LADOT our advice to you is make your busses run on time or give those lines to an organization that can focus on just that, because waiting an hour is an eternity when you want to go home or need to be at work.

Public Transit riders here is the complaint form for the LADOT services. The Dash, Commuter Express and CityRide

For those of us in downtown here is the "you're awesome" form.

And here is the complaint phone number:

808-2273

by Browne Molyneux

PS. LADOT your maps are really confusing. That clockwise, counter-clockwise and the oddly placed stops on the map what the hell is that? Half of the time I think I missed busses, because I could never figure out which side of the street to be on. And in Hollywood when you have five different bus lines, how do we know? Also the return trip stops, it takes awhile to get you go the same way or you have to figure out the opposite way which is never across the street from where you came, but on some side street down and around and through an alley on a corner in front of a donut shop. It's weird and confusing.

Comments

[Mark Panitz]

LADOT los feliz doesn't run on weekends because they sames buses that they use for the Los Feliz
as the dash bus to the Griffith park
observatory and the bus does still
service hillhust on the weekends

[Browne]

That's true the LADOT Dash for the Observatory does by Hillhurst, but it doesn't travel the same route as the regular Los Feliz shuttle and it runs way less often like every 35 minutes in comparison to every 15, which actually in LADOT times the 15 is every 30 minutes and the Observatory can be a hour. The Los Feliz and Silver Lake area is badly in need of frequent public transit options owing to the hills, the lack of stops via MTA bus and the amount of older people and people with small children in the area.

A Dash to get us to Albertson's and Trader Joe's (with the former cross walk of death) would be very nice. Many days I would walk up Los Feliz blvd with a bag of groceries cursing the LADOT for not having decent service in the area.

[Nancy]

I have an update. Someone from LADDOT called me a few hours ago, and said that he was contacting the driver of the Encino-headed 549. Initially the rep on the phone asked me about "the construction," to which I replied, "What construction?" Anyway, I said I was probably going to try and take it today, and was assured that the bus will arrive. ;-)

[Nancy]

Oh...and thanks, Browne, for contacting them too. I'm not sure if I would have gotten a call back without you!

[Nancy]

ok. So I just attempted to take the 549 and discovered what the problem is. I waited at the appropriate stop, but the westbound 549 appears to have changed its stop from Alameda/Pass to Riverside/Pass. No change to the web site, no change to the sign. I was able to make out the bus in the distance. And was left stranded. Again. :-(

[browne]

Oh no Nancy, that's horrible. You call and ask about a problem, you tell them the stop and you would think that someone on the customer service line would go, "Hey that stop moved." That would be nice, that would be competent.

I feel your pain, because I had similar experiences.

One of my most recent experiences was I was on my way to a freelance writing gig about a political campaign headquarters. I had to go to Compton (this is via the MTA) and so I call Metro, to confirm and things, well I got on the 51 I think it was turns out there are TWO 51s (or maybe the 53) and one is a short line.

The thing that pissed me off is that I asked the bus driver was he going to blah, blah and he was like, "Yes." I get to a certain point and he's like, "This is it." And I'm like, "Dude, uh this isn't the stop." And he's like "Well this is my stop." So I'm like when is the next bus and do you know what dude does? He laughs at me and says, "It just passed by."

I was so mad I said, "Real f*cking nice, jerk off."

I wouldn't have done that, but he laughed and he thought this was so amusing.

Now I don't always blame people on the phone, because when there are changes such as these that should be noted prominently on the website and at the very least when you're talking to a customer service rep about a problem they should have some due diligence.

This is very disappointing. I really had high hopes that this issue would be resolved.

I'm inspired to write another post for Friday. On the customer service issue.

[Nancy]

I called the complaint line last night, and the guy who answered said it had been diverted due to the construction on Alameda - road work that ended several months ago! I guess they put up a temporary sign, but a vandal tore it down. They never fixed that. They never updated the web site. It looks like the route might be adjusted because of my complaint, but now I don't know when it's going to switch back to the Alameda stop. They told me to call back in order to find out. (?!)

Oh well. I'm catching a ride with a coworker now in exchange for a cup of coffee. It's not as cheap as the 549, but at least he doesn't leave without me. ;-)

[Ed Greenberg]

My 573 service (to UCLA mornings and back to Van Nuys in the afternoon) is better than the complaints listed above. There's an occasional bobble, but in general, the busses are on time and the drivers give the impression about caring that they do their jobs right.

The (metro) web site definitely has some deficiencies when reporting on LADOT busses.

[browne]

Ed,

Make sure to give a kudos to LADOT using the form at the end of this post. I think people fix things by seeing what runs right!!! The LADOT when it does work is fabulous. As you stated nice drivers who know their routes and we love hearing things going right. Plus on my on journey we get tips from other people, just like some freeways or streets are better than others, same goes for public transit.

Browne